Over the past two decades, Jigjiga, the capital of the Somali Region of Ethiopia, has become a bustling city. While ‘notorious in Ethiopia as [a] peripheral space’, Jigjiga has benefited from diaspora investments, ethnic federalism and cross-border trade. It is also characterised by longstanding and sometimes violent animosity between Ethiopia and its periphery. Daniel K. Thompson describes these transformations in a sterling ethnography which is equally interested in urban livelihoods, state securitisation and criminalised economies flowing across the nearby borders. Chapters weave between studies of urban deal-making, smuggling along bus routes, the economic ramifications of federalism and how moral economies evolve.
He writes with sophistication about the social dynamics of commerce, and his narration of topics like smuggling or government contracting is careful and enlightening rather than sensational or moralising. Moving contraband, for instance, is justified in part because it undermines Ethiopia’s fiscal claims, but such legitimation does not apply to the smuggling of immoral goods like narcotics or weapons. The book is shaped by exemplary fieldwork in difficult conditions, astute invocations of history and a breadth of reading from the Horn of Africa and beyond. Notably, Thompson has also carried out fieldwork with the Somali diaspora from Johannesburg to Minneapolis. Thompson is purposeful with his interventions, with specific arguments of interest to geographers and economic anthropologists, scholars of ethnicity across the continent and specialists of the region.
Thompson navigates in the shadow of I.M. Lewis’s influential and controversial thesis about the ‘fundamentally egalitarian character of Somali society’. Thompson handles the debates with neither iconoclasm nor polemic, instead positing there is a cultural economy of ‘nonhegemonic’ ideals concerning the virtues of personal autonomy, risk-taking, collective negotiation among people with equal rights and the social control of economic resources. If these are familiar to specialists, Thompson’s urban setting brings important insights into how such moral economies are lived and reproduced. On the one hand, Thompson’s interlocutors share much with this pastoral genealogy: they are mobile, with dispersed assets and relations, and navigate considerable uncertainty. On the other hand, city living brings novel realities, including co-presence with those who can make claims on your goodwill and mutuality. City life challenges ‘egalitarian orientations’, as ‘demands for recognition and reciprocity could quickly become overwhelming’. Somalis worked to uphold obligations but also avoid too many entreaties, ‘moving around the city in unpredictable ways and using the urban landscape to avoid encounters with people to whom they are obligated’. He is attentive to the micro-practices of how people reach a diversified portfolio of reciprocity – neither too present nor too absent. His interlocutor, Amin, went to half a dozen chat lounges over the course of the week, chewing with a range of contacts – less laconic idling than investing in information and relations.
Jigjiga’s transformation is, partly, due to the devolution of power and revenue to the Somali Region. Urban growth in apartment blocks and hotels is also the result of substantial investment and return migration. This is good business, but investment also performs loyalty, opening more lucrative doors to government tenders. But investments can also be a liability, and the state has used the diaspora’s fixed capital as collateral to enforce political compliance. Thompson’s interlocutors are alert to this bind, joking that buildings may be nice, but they lack wheels to move them when necessary. A historical imaginary of mobile capital – livestock – animates ideas of value, even if urbanisation makes it harder.
For Africanists, Thompson provides an approach that draws equally on scholars of ‘world cities’ and rural settings. Scholars of larger cities may wonder how much is to be gained from a study of Jigjiga, whose population – while increasing rapidly – was only a quarter of a million people in 2007. For instance, I wondered if the dense networks of social emplacement might have been cast in a new light by a literature on ‘neighborhoods’ or ‘village life’ rather than cities. And, yet, in a host of ways, Jigjiga is exemplary of shared urbanist concerns: real estate booms, transnational investment, multiethnic relations and securitisation.
The book documents fraught efforts to Ethiopianise Somalis and include them within the local government. But Jigjiga is shaped by longstanding ethnicised tropes (e.g., Somalis don’t pay taxes and are internal subversives). Thompson emphasises that nonhegemonic notions are not the result of uniquely Somali dynamics; rather, they emerge in contrast to others, including Ethiopian elites in Addis. When Somalis say that people are important – because while money comes and goes, social relations endure – it is contrasted with stereotypes about ‘Habeshas’ who ‘will sacrifice relationships for money’. The tension here is how to account for elements that can variously be seen as egalitarian and hierarchical. Through ideas like ‘egalitarian orientations’, Thompson avoids essentialising ethnicised moral economies, but the anxieties of reciprocal dependencies (e.g., among less powerful kin) emerge less clearly. Instead, the hierarchical dominance is most evidently a result of the state, despite the perhaps accentuated inequalities in Jigjiga’s social life.
